


Lullaby

by quartile



Series: Acoustic, Electric [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Another "how they got together" study, If you like explicit this isn't for you, M/M, Post-Retcon Meteor, Rosemary (background), but you can fill it in between the lines, davekat - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-05
Updated: 2016-08-05
Packaged: 2018-07-29 10:09:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7680307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quartile/pseuds/quartile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short Davekat post-retcon meteor fic.</p><p>Karkat says, “This is so fucking dumb.” Silence, and then, “Can I hang out in here a little? I can bring my pile, I won’t bug you, I just... I don’t want to be alone with the contents of my thinkpan right now.”</p><p>Dave in his drowsiness scoots over. “Take a load off. Plenty of room.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lullaby

“Dave? You up?”

Dave feels a hand on his shoulder. The silhouette of his friend is barely discernible in the dark.

“Kar Mar Superstar,” he murmurs. “What time is it?”

He hears Karkat sigh. “Fuck. I’m sorry. This is dumb. I shouldn’t have woken you.”

Dave yawns. “It’s cool, dude. Talk.”

Karkat says, ”I can’t sleep. I was hoping you were up. I wanted... this is so fucking dumb.” Silence, and then, “Can I hang out in here a little? I can bring my pile, I won’t bug you, I just... I don’t want to be alone with the contents of my thinkpan right now.”

Dave in his drowsiness scoots over. “Take a load off. Plenty of room.” He pats the vacated side of the bed. 

Karkat pushes his shoes off and sits awkwardly on top of the blanket, drawing his knees to his chest. In Dave’s room, the clank and whirr of distant heating and cooling units isn’t nearly as jarring. Dave flips his pillow to the cool side and stretches out on his back, one arm flung above his head. “Chill here as long as you want, ‘m going back to sleep,” he mumbles.

Soon Karkat hears Dave’s breathing become slow and even. He sorts through a hive of thoughts, picking up one at a time and inspecting it before rehoming it in its cell. Another half a sweep to go on the cold hurtling rock. Can’t change that. Gamzee on house arrest, as it were, monitored by each of them in turn. Their moirailship on the rocks. 

Karkat groans. He’s done all he could. On his surveillance shifts, he’d sit with Gamzee, spending hours bearing witness as Gamzee rocked, or rambled about his destiny and some kind of miraculous child he was born to raise. Sometimes Karkat rubs his back, or shoosh-paps him down from a particularly stress- and rage-induced outburst. He’s tried to suss out Gamzee’s feelings about the new session and what’s to come. And he still searches the other troll’s face for any sign of comprehension or remorse.

The house arrest and the surveillance roster were Vriska’s idea. He doesn’t like it. But what the fuck else is he supposed to do? 

Maybe he isn’t cut out to have a moirail. Karkat hugs his knees. At least he has a friend, he thinks, watching Dave’s chest rise and fall where he’s pushed the blanket away in his sleep. Karkat stands up slowly, picks up his shoes, and heads back to his own block.

\--

The next night, Dave hears Karkat before he feels the touch on his shoulder.

“Karkat.” Dave sits up, blinking. 

“Can I hang out again? It’s quieter in here.”

“Mi meteor es su meteor.” Dave leans back on an elbow as Karkat lies down stiffly on top of the blanket. “Relax, dude. You’re making me tense just looking at you,” Dave says. 

“What did your guardian do when you couldn’t sleep?” Karkat asks.

Dave scoffs. “No better time to spin some sick beats, evidently. Preferably at top volume. The more bass, the better. Get a little groove going, a little shade.”

Karkat grimaces at that. “What kind of asshole human lusus would do that?”

“My kind. Sleep was a privilege you earned by not letting shit faze you. Another faultless Strider self-preservation technique, mastered.”

“That’s fucked up,” says Karkat.

The HVAC in the core cycles off with a clunk. Karkat hadn’t realized how badly his ears were ringing until the constant drone abruptly cut out.

“So how does a lusus get a troll to fall asleep?” says Dave.

“You wouldn’t understand,” Karkat says. “When I was little, he did this... clicky thing, with his voice. He’d snap his jaws and kind of hum. It was like a song, the same one each time.”

“Oh, like a lullaby.”

Karkat closes his eyes, remembering. “It was really soothing. That and a mug of hot cholerbeast broth.”

“Ugh, no, man,” says Dave, pushing his friend’s arm. “This is not the time to bring your gross troll cuisine into it. You are not Troll Alton Brown and this is not Troll Eats.”

Karkat pushes back. “Shut the fuck up. What do you know. Nothing. You weren’t there. Your junior interspecies ambassador badge has been revoked.”

Dave fails to take the bait. He’s quiet for so long that Karkat is sure he’s drifted off again. Silence floats down from the ceiling. Karkat closes his eyes and tries to think of nothing.

“How did it go?” says Dave out of nowhere.

“What?”

“Your crabdad’s lullaby. How did it go?”

“Oh, go polish your bulge with your stupid god cape.”

“I’m serious. Lay it on me.”

“Fine. Okay. I’m warning you, it’s not like your insipid human-wiggler-falls-cradle-and-all -from-a-broken-frond-nub nonsense,” says Karkat, adding, “Who the fuck thought THAT was a good thing to sing to a kid.” He sits up and takes a breath.

Karkat begins to trill and click, a cricket softly beatboxing in a slow 5/4 time. Soon he adds a horizon note of hums. There isn’t a melody per se, thinks Dave, more like an atmosphere. It feels like a scalp massage, or like when someone scratches your back in just the right spot. Dave feels the tension abandon his shoulders, drawn off by the low thrum of Karkat’s voice.

Dave’s mind wanders. He finds himself thinking of laundry days back at the old apartment. He’d sit by the coin-op dryer until it buzzed, then tug a favorite T-shirt out of the pile and pull it over his head while it was still warm. His skin prickles at the memory of being wrapped close in its residual heat, and the comforting smell of laundry powder. Safe, he thinks.

Karkat’s clicking lullaby continues, turning back on itself, repeating. With each cycle, he drops into lower keys, until the clicks and hums and growls resolve into one continuous deep, slowly vibrating note.

Karkat finishes on a quiet hum, eyes closed. He’s wrapped his arms around himself as if protecting something intimate and fragile and little. 

When he opens his eyes, Dave is watching him intently. Karkat clears his throat. “I can’t do the lower trills like he did.” Sharing something this personal, with Dave so present and attentive, Karkat feels a pang of something he can’t place. Some of it is from missing his lusus. He knows that, he’d expected it. But there is something else just behind it. Like nostalgia, or longing, but not quite. But what is it called if you’ve never felt it before? 

“Damn,” Dave murmurs. “Mind officially blown. Your voice is so... I don’t know. Resonant.” He puts his palm on Karkat’s chest as if to absorb any lingering vibrations. “How do you even do that? I swear you were hitting two or three natural overtones in there. We should sample that, work it into a mix.” 

Karkat’s eyes flick down to Dave’s hand and back to his face. 

“Anyway,” Karkat says, embarrassed. “I should get back to my block.”

“Well, or,” Dave says. “You could just crash here.” He lifts the blanket in invitation. His face is unguarded in the dark. “If it would help you sleep, I mean. If you want. It’s cool.”

“I. Hm. Okay.” Karkat kicks off his shoes and crawls in next to Dave, who says, “You’re going to roast in that sweater, dude.” 

Karkat stands to peel off the sweater and gray jeans, stripping to his T-shirt and boxers. “Happy now?” he says, cautiously fitting himself into the space Dave has made for him. 

“Can I have a bedtime story?” asks Dave.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Why not. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Once upon a time there was an asshole on a flying rock who wouldn’t let his friend achieve the sweet dreamless oblivion for which he so fervently prayed. One day, said asshole was devoured by horrorterrors with a taste for flame-broiled human. The end. Now excuse me while I attempt to recline in the arms of Troll Morpheus before my thinkpan splits open like a fiduspawn.” 

“Okay. Night-night, don’t let the spidertroll bite,” says Dave. 

Karkat wakes twice in the night. Once from a dream in which he’s running through streets he doesn’t recognize, lit by a red sunset, with a message he has to deliver but can’t pronounce. The second time was after dreaming of feathered wings tracing paths along his face. He gets up and draws the crumpled blanket over Dave’s bare shoulders before pulling on his jeans and slipping out. 

\--

“My point is, it’s the only Troll Adam Sandler movie that doesn’t make me want to—” Karkat is saying as Dave and he enter the common room. They stop short. Someone else has gotten to the sofa first. Vriska has wedged herself smack dab in the middle of Kanaya and Rose’s reading hour. Kanaya mouths “Save me” to Karkat, who shrugs apologetically. From the look on Rose’s face, he’s pretty sure she’s about to accidentally slosh her oil-slicked coffee into Vriska’s lap.

Dave catches Karkat’s eye and jerks his head back toward the hallway. With three or four deft steps backward, they’re on the transportalizer and heading to Dave’s room to set up the husktop. 

Karkat falls asleep on Dave’s bed during the movie. He’s having the dream of feathers again. A giant black bird is perched at his side, shielding him from an onslaught of meteors with one great wing. The other wing is gently stroking his face. It feels so real.

The movie is still playing in the background.

This isn’t a dream, he realizes. He erupts into consciousness with a jolt, wide awake, lying stock-still as fingertips brush his cheek and trail over his jaw, along his throat.

“Strider?” he whispers. The boy murmurs something unintelligible, and the hand retreats. 

Karkat holds his breath, then rolls over to face Dave, who is lying next to him on the bed. Dave’s eyes are closed. “Strider.” No answer. “Dave.”

Karkat feels the tug in his chest again. _What is he doing? He doesn’t mean it. He doesn’t mean anything by it. This can’t mean anything. And if you think it does, that’s just your incorrigible, stupid, desperate heart, longing for any pathetic semblance of intimacy you can grab. So eager and so fucking dumb._

He listens. Dave’s breathing has changed. It’s shallow. 

Karkat leans over until his lips are very close to Dave’s ear. “Dave, I know you can hear me,” he says, heart racing. “Don’t play. Please.”

There it is. Dave’s eyes flutter open. “I think,” he says hoarsely, “I think I’m not playing.” 

He moves his hand within reach again. 

Karkat watches, speechless, as Dave touches his face. Touches his black hair. Brings his palm to Karkat’s chest.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Dave whispers. “I don’t know anything anymore. But I’m not playing, Kar.”

Dave kisses his cheek, then his jaw. Karkat turns to catch the next kiss on his lips. 

Sensations wash over Karkat as Dave presses his tongue past his lips. He slips a hand under Dave’s shirt, feeling the warm curve of his spine, the flat shoulder blades. His own tongue seeks Dave’s and he’s rewarded with a gasp and a sigh. Closer, closer, urges every nerve in his body. 

He’s dizzy. It’s hard to breathe. Dave kisses his throat, then presses his ear to Karkat’s thorax, which is trembling with vibrations. “These sounds right here,” he murmurs. “They’re good, right?”

“Good, yes. Good,” says Karkat. And then he completely forgets how to speak.

\--

The husktop screen casts blue-green light across the bed. Dave shudders involuntarily with each new place on his body set alight by Karkat’s hands. 

Dave grazes Karkat’s face with a thumb, fingers stroking his hair behind his ear. Karkat nestles his head into Dave’s palm and lets himself feel, and feel, and feel.

He wants to shout or cry or sing, he wants to keep tasting this strange sweetness, he wants to ride these waves forever.


End file.
